I'm fascinated with how we can innovate in the nonprofit + cause-related environment, a place where resource-limitations (financial and human) restrict innovation and creativity and where these assets are needed most. In my studies of network theory, I've learned that diverse connections are where innovation happens--when people from two or more disciplines come together. It was our intuitive understanding of this a decade ago that encouraged Deyden and I to position our company in such a way as to bridge worlds and industries.

I got thinking about all of this again because of an article in the NY Times yesterday that talked about innovation. It talks about the communication challenge in bringing a diverse group of people together to innovate:

To innovate...you have to bring together people with a variety of skills. If those people can’t communicate clearly with one another, innovation gets bogged down in the abstract language of specialization and expertise. “It’s kind of like the ugly American tourist trying to get across an idea in another country by speaking English slowly and more loudly,” he says. “You’ve got to find the common connections.”

It also talks about a new position that many in the corporate world are creating called the "zero-gravity thinker" who is supposed to be a generalist that can ask basic questions that get people to "look at their world differently and, as a result...come up with new solutions to old problems.” It would be great to get this kind of a position happening at foundations and bigger nonprofit institutions so that they can once again lead the sector in innovation and creative solutions.

Matt Bai, NY Times writer + author of “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics", wrote a quick piece in the magazine this week on how the current candidates have taken the wrong lessons from the Dean campaign's use of the Internet. He hits upon the key elements that we've been going on and on about: engaging people today happens best when you let them take control.

A great example of this that Matt references is how a group of Ron Paul supporters that had nothing to do with the campaign, organized an online fund-raiser on Guy Fawkes Day, bringing in more than $4 million and 21,000 new contributors in a single day — the largest 24-hour haul of any Republican candidate to date.

Here are some of the great quotes:

In the new and evolving online world, the greatest momentum goes not to the candidate with the most detailed plan for conquering the Web but to the candidate who surrenders his own image to the clicking masses

Such developments probably came as no surprise to many in the business world, who understood years ago that the Web represented not simply another mass medium to be gamed but also a fundamental shift in the once static relationship between producer and consumer. It is by nature a participatory medium, in which customers demand a more personal stake in the products they consume.